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EU fails to back ‘directive’ that penalizes the oil sands — but the threat isn’t gone
It wasn’t just the oil sands that dodged a bullet on Thursday, when Eurocrats failed to support a “Fuel Quality Directive” that would have penalized European companies using such oil. Although the move would have no direct impact, since Canada exports little or no oil sands oil directly to Europe, it would have darkened the cloud over Canadian/European free trade aspirations and created a dangerous precedent.
It would have further handed control of trade, and thus the Canadian economy, to a bureaucratic juggernaut effectively controlled by environmental radicals through political puppets. It would also have raised the possibility that restrictions might extend to U.S. exports to Europe of refined products containing oil from the oil sands.
Canada’s Natural Resources Minister, Joe Oliver, described the vote as a “resounding win,” but noted that Canada would continue to defend its interests against “unjustified and discriminatory measures.” Which is a pretty good definition of climate policies in general.
Canada has threatened to take the European Union to the World Trade Organization over these potential restrictions. Fortunately, neither time, science nor economic sense are on the side of the initiative, which now goes to ministers in the European Council for consideration. While the EU is now on the point of recession, or worse, other EU climate initiatives are deservedly in deep trouble.
Vociferous protests from the U.S., China, India and Russia about the EU’s attempts to foist its dead-parrot emissions-trading scheme onto their airlines led to the announcement on Wednesday of a package of possible retaliatory measures. Meanwhile, Europe’s green-energy efforts are disappearing down the composting toilet.
Germany has provided $130-billion of subsidies in order to buy the world less than one day’s respite from climate Armaggedon. Spain has finally caught on, as it sinks beneath the waves of government-incurred debt, that each “green” job cost two of the regular-coloured variety.
Europe was in the vanguard of the plot — sorry, I mean “sustainable strategy” — to use the threat of catastrophic man-made climate change to justify much greater bureaucratic control over every aspect of our lives. Similarly, Europe was out front in promoting the social democratic model that would provide growth and economic security for all. We can see how that’s going. The EU was also the trial run for the even more ambitious agenda of “global governance,” whose promoters will be meeting at yet another cast-of-thousands, no-expenses-spared, conference in Rio later this year, where they will “celebrate,” presumably without conspicuous embarrassment, the 20th anniversary of the 1992 UN Rio conference at which the climate-policy fiasco was launched.
The subsequent Kyoto process that was meant to oversee global co-ordination to combat climate catastrophe has utterly collapsed. The essential uncertainties of climate science also finally seem to be getting past a crusading media to the general public. Projections from the International Energy Agency have exposed the utter hypocrisy of those governments that — under pressure from a powerful and well-funded environmental movement, and spurred on by their own bureaucracies — have committed to draconian emissions reductions that they have no way of meeting except through economic collapse.
The EU’s Fuel Quality Directive — which should perhaps have been called the “Fuel Sanctity Directive” since it was based on the quasi-religious condemnation of “dirty” oil — was a typical cooked-up job to bring industry into line by the NGO-bureaucratic complex.
For the rest of this column, please go to the National Post website: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/02/23/fps-peter-foster-oil-sands-dodge-bullet-in-brussels/